Honeybee Democracy

Honeybee Democracy (2010) by Thomas Seeley

GoodReads meta-data is 273 pages, rated 4.19 by 901 litizens.  

Genre: nonfiction, popular science 

Verdict:  Hive mind.  

In this beguiling, informative, and elegant study, the author tells us much about the bees and a little about himself and other bee-ologists.  

All that buzzing, flitting, and waggling that bees do is purposive behaviour and the more closely it is studied the more the purpose(s) are revealed.  While hearing someone speak Cantonese sounds like gibberish to the uninitiated when one learns to hear, speak, and write it, the meanings encoded within it gradually appear.  So it is with language of bees in their activities.

While the main focus of the book is on site selection for a new nest when a hive swarms (i.e., divides), there is much about how the hive comes to that juncture.  An important part of that story is the division of labour among bees.  Among the 10,000 bees in a typical hive in upstate New York where most of the research underlying this study was done, a certain percentage are foragers who leave the hive’s nest each morning with the first light on dry days to harvest from sources of food to carry back to the nest.  

At certain times some of the emeritus foragers become scouts for a new nesting site.  The number is not a great. maybe 50-100 in a hive of 10,000.  This is highly specialised role and only a few undertake it.  When each single bee finds a potential spot she examines it and then reports back to the hive, which absorbs the input from all of the several scouts.  One spot may be scouted by many bees, but another will be scouted only by a few.  Yet the ultimate selection may be that latter which only a few scouts initially reported.  But as it gains favour, more scouts will visit it and report back.

The bees’ decision is not clouded by history, ego, institutions, or ideology.  Site selection shows no preference for doing what they did last time or the time before.  Swarms do not try to return to areas used previously.  History is not a determinate.  Nor does ego enter into it.  Even scouts who continually brought back data about a reasonable site, go along with the swarm when it opts for an alternative.  Nor are there institutional constraints like a fixed calendar or an electoral college.  Still less is there an ideology (or religion) that takes precedence. 

It is all so unlike human decision-making where history is always a factor:  we keep repeating what we already did (even when it no longer works).  Ego which is all for many of us: my way or the highway (for you or me).  The fixed calendar prevails in the timing of elections. And ideology: god told me this is THE tree.  Compared to much human decision-making, the bees are rational. 

There are rare occasions when a hive mind cannot decide. In such instance the hives may (1) stay where it is too long and suffer the fatal consequences or (2) the swarm leaving the hive may itself divide, dawdle, and dither and likewise suffer the consequences delivered by the changing seasons.  In these two cases all members of the swarm perish.  

To explain the bees’ hive mind the author makes analogies to human decision-making, particularly the fabled New England town meetings, but I fear he has seen few of those or he would have seen history, ego, and ideology driving out assessment, fact, and science.  Perhaps he was influenced at a remove by Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961), which rather idealised these meetings.  (Dahl changed his mind later in How Democratic is the American Constitution? [2001].)  

The methods this author uses to study bee decision-making are ingenious, labor intensive, amusing, and fruitful, yielding a plethora of data as well as stings!  The location of a new nest is a life-or-death decision for the members of a swarm and it may take several days for it to be determined.  And sometimes the site is not adequate and the swarm dies.  This failure is not due to mistaken decision-making so much as the intensity of the elements.  The swarm may have chosen the best available site, but not even that site could not withstand the depth of that particular winter.  Sad to say, a surprising high percentage of swarms dividing off from a hive, die as hostages to climate and weather. Perhaps a third of them meet this fate.  The mortality rate among bees is surprisingly high to this neophyte.  

I did find much of the exposition too technical for this layman.  

N.B.  Many bees were killed in the course of this study. Many.  

All these buzzing bees remind me of Dutchman Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705 [1714]). In it Mandeville implies that private vices lead to social benefits, and that conversely private virtues may lead to social collapse.  That is, society is an aggregation of self-interested individuals bound by convention and regulated by law who are more interested in themselves than anyone else. Social cohesion results, paradoxically, from competition and conflict. All benefit from a rules-of-the-game cooperation which constrains the competition and conflict.  Hobbes’s war of all against all is brought constrained by baselines with a rulebook and some referees.    

If, however, competition and conflict are replaced by a rule of singular virtue, the result will be ruin.  The effort to regulate every aspect of life according to (someone’s idea of) virtue will strangle productivity, cooperation, and more.  Think of a society ordered by Pat Robertson!  Or Rush Cancer.  Thomas More. George Pell.  Fred Nile.  Alan Jones. Bernie Sanders.  A monocular society weakens itself.  

While the metaphor of the bees may bring to mind Adam Smith’s invisible hand, that is more focused on economic production and distribution, while Mandeville’s remit is more social than economic. 

Inspired by this book I read a sample of José Luis de Juan’s Napoleon’s Beekeeper (2019) but found it so convoluted and cryptic it made no sense to me, probably destined for a Booker Prize. However, at the time it rated a respectable 3.25 from 8 litizens on GoodReads.      

Mamur Zapt

Mamur Zapt

GoodReads meta-data: See list of titles below.

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Highly recommended. 

I have been reading my way through a krimi series by Michael Pearce.  The touch is light, the locale exotic, and the treatment respectful and affectionate, as the Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police strives to keep order in an essentially disordered Cairo (and beyond) in the 1900s.  This fearsome Head is the Mamur Zapt to give the job its Arabic name.  He is one Gareth Owen, a Welsh captain in the British Army that occupied Egypt to secure repayment of loans, as the French once tried to do in Mexico and the Germans in Venezuela.  

The legal fiction at the time was that Egypt was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire at the indulgence of the Sultan in distant Constantinople who appointed the local governor, the Khedive.  This arrangement came about in the aftermath of the construction of the Suez Canal which had led to vast investments and speculation in Egypt with attendant boom, corruption, and bust, occasioning ever greater tax increases to repay loans.  The Khedive liked the high life and had soon sold all the Suez Canal shares assigned to Egypt to pay for his pleasure.  French and British financial interests in Egypt reduced the Ottoman Empire’s sway over the region and that suited the Khedive to get away from the Sultan’s taxing reach.   

The high life was very expensive because it included hundreds of pashas and their extended families who also got on the gravy train; in 1882 the party ended.  A British Army intervened and the Khedive agreed to an arrangement that made Egypt a protectorate of Great Britain but still nominally associated with the Ottoman Empire so it was not coloured British pink on maps.  None of this was easy. There was at least one pitched battle in 1882 before the Khedive went to the table, where he and the pashas were guaranteed British support in return for inviting the British to stay and stay and stay over the protests from the Sultan.  That the Ottoman Empire could not resist this arrangement was one sign of its own decline.  

Pearce was born in Sudan, educated in Cairo, and obviously knows the lands and peoples well, and holds them in high esteem.  Most of the violence occurs off stage and in some titles there is no violence at all, but a mystery of a theft or — in one — a strange reappearance.  Some of the events occur in what was then called Egyptian Sudan, a vast area, larger than India and nearly as diverse though not densely populated. 

In these pages Cairo is a living museum of humanity with its myriad of races, ethnicities, nationalities, hundreds of religions, thousands of sects, alongside remnants of ancient histories (Pharaonic, Greek, Roman), and the endless variety among the Arabs themselves.  All are dominated and much is determined by the relentless Sun and the life-giving Nile.  Then there are the interlopers — Russian, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Mingrelian, French, American, English, Montenegrin — who come to steal ancient artefacts or to build casinos or railroads for maximum profit and generally exploit the region. 

The author is in no hurry to crowd in his encyclopaedic knowledge of Egypt but includes some title by title.  Nor he is in any rush to give Owen a long and tiresome back story.  We learn more about Owen as each title unfolds as the sequence continues.  

Michael Pearce. Chapeaux!

One of the nationalities that is growing in awareness among Cairenes is Egyptian Nationalism: Egypt for Egyptians, and all that, but as many characters note, it is no easy matter to say who is and who is not an Egyptian. The Greek Christian Copts entered Egypt long before the Muslim Arabs and have a claim to historical priority.  The Sudanese in the south were native to the region since before time. Religious conflicts among Jews, Copts, and Muslims are common as are conflicts among sects within each of these religions.  Ottoman intrigues to undermine the Brits are daily.  And in some of the later titles, the women of the burka become restive.  Tourists are also a factor for good when the spend money, and bad when they overstep the mark or are victims of crimes.  

In this swirl Owen goes about his business, censoring the local press every night and frequenting coffee houses to keep in touch with the vast network of informants he inherited when appointed.  The Khedive liked a Brit in the job so that he could distance himself from any acts of the Secret Police, while being sure the acts occurred to keep his regime stable.  In same spirit of McKinsey management, the Brits can also disown the Mamur Zapt, if need be, as an agent of Khedive.  Thus Owen could be stabbed in the back twice.  However, sometimes two masters can be played off against each other.

Owen takes a softly, softly approach that at times irritates the offstage Khedive, but he is usually more interested in the harem than anything else.  Most of the Brits accept softly softy but there is an Army in occupation and sometimes it takes all of Owen’s growing skill to keep the soldiers in the barracks and out of trouble.  His job is to prevent problems more than solve them and once the soldiers appear to keep order, inevitably disorder follows.  There is an iron law in that.

Owen has a shambling multi-lingual Greek as his number one legman, who has the uncanny ability to get people talking to him from market porters, to hotel maids, to slumming tourists.  The office is run with Prussian efficiency by Nikos, a Copt, who worships the files and who is always there with the files.  Owen has speculated that he sleeps in an empty drawer with the name Nikos on it, but since Nikos keeps everything, including his door, locked Owen has never been able to confirm this suspicion.  Selim provides the muscle when that is needed. 

Then there is Paul, the aide-de-camp of the Consul-General, who is in fact the military governor of the protectorate.  Paul is a master of never saying ‘no’ when insuring that things do not happen and likewise of never saying ‘yes’ but insuring the right things do happen.  He is the consummate master of committee meetings who agrees with everyone, never commits himself, and yet the outcome is always what he wants.    

Owen also has a good friend in the Egyptian judiciary with whom he works ever more closely on cases.  Mahmoud el Zaki, an Egyptian nationalist, who aspires to see a modern Egypt make its own way in the world free of British suzerainty, but who himself remains wedded to many of the old ways where women are concerned. 

Owen has a mistress, an Egyptian named Zeinab, who is a force of nature in her own right.  No burka and veil for her.  She can be counted on the stimulate Owen in many ways.  She has even bamboozled that master of spin Paul more than once.  

Other characters include the operational commander of the uniformed police, a tall, pudgy, pink Scots named McPhee who was a school headmaster back in the Highlands, but who wanted a job in Egypt because he loves the cultural mélange in Cairo.  If ever Owen needs to trace a fragment of a tile, McPhee may be able to tell him where it was made.  Though to tell him, McPhee may first try to explain the place of tiles in Egyptian culture at great length.  And don’t get him started on mosques about which he knows everything and more: Sheiks have been known to consult McPhee on such matters. Windbag though he is, McPhee is an excellent organiser, having learned from unruly Scots schoolboys, and he can be relied upon in the crunch to turn out the uniforms when necessary.

No one is a cartoon in these stories. Even some pretty unlikely and unlikeable characters finish as rounded individuals like the dissolute riding’, huntin’, and shootin’ Egyptian prince who at the eleventh hour saves Owen’s life.  In an earlier title Owen was rescued from an assassination attempt by some smugglers thanks to a village watchman, who was in fact a twelve-year old girl.

A word of warning for those who start at the beginning.  Each of the novels, no doubt at the insistence of the publisher, is stand-alone.  The result is that basic information about the Egyptian legal system, Owen’s place in Egypt and his personal life, and the basics of the context are repeated in each novel.  It is like those cooking shows where in each episode the chef says heat the wok first or boil the water first.  Got it. By volume fifteen below readers are jaded by this repetition and I expect it dissuades some from continuing.  

 1.The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet. Collins Crime. 1988. 

2.The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog. Collins Crime. 1989. 

3.The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous. Collins. 1990. 

4.The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind. Harper Fontana. 1991. 

5.The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in the Nile. Collins. 1992. 

6.The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt. Collins Crime. 1992.

7.The Mamur Zapt and the Camel of Destruction. Collins Crime. 1993. 

8.The Snake Catcher’s Daughter. Collins Crime. 1994. 

9.The Mingrelian Conspiracy. Collins Crime. 1995. 

10.The Fig Tree Murder. Collins Crime. 1997. 

11.The Last Cut. Collins Crime. 1998. 

12.Death of an Effendi. Collins Crime. 1999. 

13.A Cold Touch of Ice. Harper Collins. 2000. 

14.The Face in the Cemetery. Collins Crime. 2001. 

15.The Point in the Market. Poisoned Pen. 2003. 

16.The Mark of the Pasha. Poisoned Pen. 2008. 

17.The Bride Box. Severn House. 2013. 

18.The Mouth of the Crocodile. Severn House. 2015. 

19.The Women of the Souk. Severn House. 2016.

Macquarie (2019) by Grantlee Kieza

Macquarie (2019) by Grantlee Kieza

GoodReads meta-data, 576 pages, rated 4.45 by 40 litizens  

Gerne: Biography

Verdict: Visionary

Lachlan Macquarie (1762 – 1824) was the longest serving early Governor of the New South Wales Colony (1810-1821), and without a doubt the one who did the most to shape Sydney and beyond.  Today the Hospital, Mint, Barracks, and Parliament House still standing proud on Macquarie Street are his testament.  He was a visionary and a reformer who gave convicts a second, and at times, a third chance at redemption.  He battled the Colonial Office to develop New South Wales, while dealing with the many local conflicts. To anticipate what follows, the Colonial Office did not want New South Wales to prosper, while the locals were more interested in undermining each other than laying the groundwork for the future.  

How did he come to these qualities and why was he chosen for New South Wales? Those were the questions that prompted me to read this biography.   Below are the inferences I drew from it. They are not questions pursued explicitly by the author who concentrates on the day-by-day record.  

Macquarie grew up poor but proud and made a second home in the British Army.  Long before he arrived in Sydney Town he was well travelled and much experienced.  He had served in the Army in North America during the last stages of the American Revolutionary War, the West Indies, India, and Egypt and between these postings had traveled through Persia, Russia, and South Africa.

He recurrent dream was to prosper in the Army and retire to the life of a Scots laird back home.  At times to secure that prosperity he cut corners with some very creative accounting.  In the fullness of time this sin came to light and he managed to live it down, though it blotted his chances for promotion for years.  

He often idled away the hours sketching how he, as a highland laird, would lay out a property of crofters in Scotland for the benefit of both master and men.  These thoughts and jottings were the seeds that later fell to earth in Sydney.  When they did, they were nurtured by the great cities he had seen on his travels, Bombay, St Petersburg, Alexandria, and London.  

That the Army, albeit reluctantly, gave him a second chance seared into him and he tried thereafter to live up to it.  That second chance was largely due to the circumstances for it was during the Napoleonic Wars when experienced officers were at a premium.  If he had been dismissed, then someone else would have to be found to take his place and responsibilities.  

In the grounds of Hyde Park.

He was a correspondent who wrote many letters, often keeping copies of his own, and he retained, as one did in those days, the letters he received.  In the stereotypical manner of a thrifty Scot he also kept careful records of his incomes and expenses.  This penchant for keeping notes and records made him an unofficial accountant many times where he weakened to the temptation to fiddle the books.  This penchant also left behind an extensive archive mined in these pages.  

During more than a decade in India where he saw combat and did a great deal of organising and marching, he married an Anglo-Indian woman, Jane Jarvis, who subsequently died young there.   He was also in the last battle at Alexandria in Egypt to expel the French.  At the time, democracy was identified with the excesses of the French Revolution and, ironically, Napoleon, and so Macquarie reviled it.  

New South Wales was roiling with the Rum Rebellion against Governor William Bligh when Macquarie was dispatched to put oil on the waters.  He had spent years managing-up, that is, stroking his superiors in the hope of promotion, and had become something of the patient and persistent diplomat.  He needed those qualities when he got to Australia.  

In Sydney he found there a three (or more)-sided conflict among the free settlers (sometimes called squatters), the irascible Governor Bligh and his supporters (mostly his own family and appointees) and the convicts (who had revolted earlier at Castle Hill, and among whom there were further divisions between criminal and political).  The rebellious free settlers wanted to use the convicts as flexible slave labour in a gig economy avant le mot.  In the absence of McKinsey managers, the egregious Reverend Samuel Marsden provided the bellicose but shallow justification for that.  Bligh did not care about the convicts but he did care about his authority to tax, especially rum to reduce the rampant alcoholism he found there.  Psst, he also got a cut of the taxes he collected. 

The accounts of this conflict read like today’s news when members of the elite spent most of their time securing their prerogatives from each other, sometimes through litigation which brings it out into the open, rather than doing their jobs.  One reviewer recently noted of a Commonwealth regulatory agency that it was unlikely much work got done considering the volume of suits and countersuits among its directors over the intemperate remarks arising from arguments over car spaces, leave allowances, salary increases, name plates, and so on.   Sounds like a university department where within every tea cup there is a storm.  

Macquarie proved tenacious and held on against the Marsden-MacArthur gang for a decade but in the end, they were many and he was one, and they wore him down.  Having slowly risen in the ranks to Major General, he resigned, and to please the Colonial Office his successor Thomas Brisbane undid much of Macquarie’s efforts at emancipating convicts. Brisbane wanted the job because he wanted to study the southern sky and built the Observatory on the hill today near the Harbour Bridge where it still stands.   

The Colonial Office wanted transportation to Australia to be a fearsome prospect that would deter criminal from offences.  Stories of Macquarie’s efforts to build a comfortable life and redeem convicts, so many of whom were petty thieves with a single offence committed in dire straits, were expensive and also counter-productive to the Colonial Office.  Nor should we forget the many Irish political prisoners who got swept up in a round-up to meet the KPIs of the day.   

Macquarie tried to make peace with the aboriginal people but not very hard or consistently, and yielded all too quickly to the demand of free settlers for a military response.  It almost seems to this reader that he used the occasion to show the settlers he was indeed a soldier and the Appin Massacre of natives followed.  Neither women nor children were spared to the cheers of the Pox News of the day. Relations between the new comers and natives never recovered thereafter when gun powder become the arbiter of the civilising Christians, though it pleased Marsden and his cronies.  

Though the author is coy about it, Macquarie contracted syphilis in the usual way while in India and it blighted much of his subsequent life.  His second wife, Elizabeth, for whom Lady Macquarie’s Chair was carved in the Botanic Gardens where it remains today, had at least six miscarriages that might have been the consequence of that disease and its treatment with mercury.   

A few years ago we saw an exhibition at the State Library about Macquarie and at the time I wondered what his inspirations and sources had been.  Hence, I was primed for this biography when the tide brought it to my notice.  

Macquarie was not a reader, it seems, not even the Bible.  There is nary a mention of a book in this study of the man.  Note also that he spelled his name in a variety of ways (as have I). 

However it was spelled, he liked seeing his name on things, hence the many places and features in Eastern Australia and Tasmania bearing his name.  He travelled around the realm far more than any of the predecessors and most of his successors, bestowing his name as he did so.  It would please him, I am sure, to note that a university now bears his name.  

The lighthouse on South Head was another of his buildings.

In the middle 1970s I boned up on Australian history reading Stalinist Manning Clark’s turgid six-volume A History of Australia (1962+) which recounts much of Macquarie’s story.  Clark identified with Marsden, whom I found as objectionable as recent churchmen who want to tell others how to live. Not knowing when to quit, I also read Herbert Evatt’s rehabilitation of Bligh, The Rum Rebellion (1943).  It was another instance where the author seemed to identify with the subject. Neither of these titles is recommended.  

Back to the book at hand, there are nits to pick.  First is the editorial decision to parallel much of Macquarie’s early biography with developments in New South Wales.  No doubt this is one way to show the context that Macquarie found when he arrived in 1810, but this reader found it distracting and padded before 1810 was reached.  Moreover, much that is included in this parallel, is never mentioned again and so is hardly background.  After all Macquarie himself did not have the benefit of all this background and hit it head on.  

Second, much of the expression is clichéd.  There are references to ‘higher ups,’ ‘sent off in scores,’ ‘bigwig,’ ‘put up his hand for,’ ‘splash his cash,’ ‘top brass,’ ‘heart of gold,’ ‘mojo,’ ‘gunned down,’ ‘two sidekicks,’ ‘the cut of his jib,’ ‘on the nose,’ ‘never going to fly,’ ‘leading lights,’ and so on and on.  Lazy and vague are these uses. No doubt someone thought they were lively and would attract readers like Alan Jones’s listeners.  As if! 

There are also plenty of anachronisms, but my favourite is a reference to a ‘slide rule.’  Its original conception dates to 1622 when tables of logarithms were combined in handbooks.  Its modern form emerged  in latter Nineteenth Century in France for military engineering and artillery plotting.  It is just possible, though unlikely, someone in Macquarie’s Sydney had a nascent equivalent, but unlikely, and in any event it just clangs as a metaphor.  Might as well refer to jet flight. By the way, I still have the slide rule that got me through the required science courses in high school and Physics in college, and which I used a lot in graduate school in the study of voting and elections.  It was a great day when I learned to use it.  Trivial fact, the engineer cum novelist Neville Shute called his autobiography Slide Rule (1954); he wrote two landmarks in Australia literature:  A Town like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957).    

Grantlee Kieza

While picking away I also note the propensity of the author to read Macquarie’s mind as in: ‘he glanced down to admire his patent-leather dress boots,’ he was ‘reminded of the wild country he had been born into,’ and more. 

Finally, a declaration of interest.  We live in a well-defined area of Newtown that was once called O’Connell Town, the first street of which was O’Connell Street named by Sir Maurice O’Connell who was Macquarie’s 2-i-C and then married Bligh’s daughter Elizabeth. We walk around park a block away in what was once called the Bligh Estate, which Elizabeth had – after years of litigation with crown authorities and competing relatives – inherited from her father.

The Brasher Doubloon (1947)

The Brasher Doubloon (1947)

IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 6.5 by 845 cinematizens

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Chandler Lite.

Montana’s own Philip Marlowe encountered a duplicitous son, an unscrupulous mother, a deranged secretary, a sty-eyed Peter Lorre wanna-be, incompetent but not venal cops, a crooked coin dealer, the mandatory blackmailer, and assorted thugs led by Michael Anthony, all in a day’s work.  He got beaten up a couple of times without taking any aspirin.  He outsmarted Plod and got the girl.   

It has superb cinematography by Lloyd Ahern who makes the viewer feel that Santa Ana Red Wind from the Mojave desert, and prepares each scene with a shot worthy of the best noir film.  This was his first credit and it is superb.  It was followed by the Miracle on 34th Street. He spend most of the 1960s and 1970s in television.  Leaden direction was by John Brahm (a Nazi refugee who surely moved faster in real life than in this still life).   

The screen play derived from Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window (1942) which had been the basis of the Mike Shayne film Time to Kill (1942), which film has more wit and energy than the title under consideration, but lacks the cinematographic artistry of Ahern.    

By the way, the coin really was minted in New York in 1787 and one sold in 2011 for $US 7.4  million Iron Men!    

all, look at who just stepped off the magazine page.

This was George Montgomery’s first major lead, and a casting mistake  This clean-cut, well-dressed and pressed, callow, neatly combed. and innocent country boy with a western slur is not the clipped, chipped, shopworn, exhausted, cynical, and jaded city-slicker Marlowe of Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, or even the elegant Robert Montgomery, who each played the part once.*  On the other hand, Nancy Guild is perfect as the edgy naif secretary, though her career only offered a mere 11 credits.  Let’s hope that she quit while she was ahead.  

But while acting kudos are on offer, the best has to go to Florence Bates as the murderous and thieving mother who put Ma Barker to shame.  Bates had majored in mathematics at the University of Texas, and then completed a law degree and practiced for sometime in San Antonio.  All this would have been unusual for the time and place for a woman. The Great Depression uprooted her and drove her into acting to make a living.

*Later incarnations of Philip Marlowe include Robert Mitchum and Powers Booth, both of whom certainly qualified as shopworn, and two another egregious mistakes: a twitchy Eliot Gould and a geriatric James Caan.  

By the Canino Test I speculate that Bogey, Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum would survive, but not Gorgeous George, Robert, and certainly not Jim or Eliot.  Powers Booth?  A borderline maybe.  

Astro-Zombies (1968) aka Astro-Vampires

Astro-Zombies (1968)  aka Astro-Vampires

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 32 Dali minutes, rated 3.3 by 1,998 suckers. 

Genre:  Junk.

Verdict: Ditto.

Ah, our old friend the mad scientist, Dr Professor Emeritus John Carradine, is at it again with his mute and deformed Igor.  After being dismissed from The AeroSpace program for ‘going too far’ (huh? Isn’t going far the point of the space program?) and after reading Dr Frankenstein’s case notes, JC has set about creating a superhuman for space flight by piecing together a creature from corpses gathered by Deformed Igor.  Warning!  This is not someone to sit next to on the bus as it goes through a tunnel.  

The creature Doc enlivens with a tweet is badder and madder than is even producer-director Ted V. Mikels and sets about killing scantily-clad young women to 1960s A-Go-Go music.  A single Ford Mustang figures in several of the scenes.  (Is this the Director’s own wheels being used as a tax write-off?)  

What’s for lunch, Doc?

Those who originally funded Frankenstein’s nationally competitive grant want to claim the intellectual property to show community impact of the research and in no time at all the FBI, the ARC, the CIA, the NH&MRC, the SPCA, and — whoa! — Santana are in pursuit.  The fraternity brothers were gripped by the latter’s frontal assembly. 

It gets worse, but it goes on.  There are so many gaps and gaffs it is impossible to summarise and it takes itself so seriously that it is as digestible as stone soup.  Yet it had long-delayed progeny in Mark of the Astro-Zombies (2004), Astro-Zombies: M3 – Cloned (2010), and Astro-Zombies M4:  Invaders from Cyberspace (2012). Yes these titles are listed on the IMDb. ‘But what about M2,’ asked the fraternity brothers? 

JC once claimed that he had appeared in more movies than any other single actor.  On some days he did his part in three films like this Z-grade effort.  The IMDb credits him with 351 appearances and that is surely a type-two error.  In comparison, Wendall Corey, who also graces this egregious effort, has a mere 79 credits, including Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966), discussed elsewhere on this blog.  For the cognoscenti Corey co-starred with the imperishable Montgomery Clift in a remarkable film called The Search (1948).  

By the way, the script is credited to Princeton graduate and one-time US Navy salt Trapper John.  He hung up his typewriter after this disaster and dedicated himself to living it down.  More Purgatorio for you, Trapper.  

The Mummy’s Curse (1944)

The Mummy’s Curse (1944)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour of runtime, rated 5.6 by 2299 cinematizens.  

Genre: Horror(ible).

Verdict: Ditto.

A pipeline project in the backwaters of Louisiana digs up Kharis (again) and off he goes; his lust undiminished by several millennia, dismemberment, and internments.  This is one hard Mummy.  

An archaeologist arrives at the construction site accompanied by a tarboosh-wearing assistant to confirm the investors’ worst fear.  This movie is a turkey.  

It is noteworthy for a film from this time that it is set in Louisiana.  Most Hollywood films were located either in a big city like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, or generic middle America.  Even more unusual for the time, it features a variety of extras who are black, Asian, and Cajun.  The human variety was seldom seen in Hollywood films of the day, except as comic relief.  Here they are stereotypes to be sure but basically working men on the job.  

Ananka on the way to the beauty parlor

There is also one very striking scene when the long dead Ananka rises steadily from the mud of the swamp.  It is slow and nicely done.  Regrettably, the unnerving effect of that scene is almost immediately spoiled when she appears thirty seconds later with a perfect coiffure, penciled eyebrows, false eye lashes, and lipstick (cosmetics which no dead Egyptienne would be seen without).  

All this is supposed to occur twenty-five years after the Mummy’s Ghost (1944) but everything is the same; nothing has changed.  Well, maybe that is true in Louisiana. 

It just so happens that in the trackless swamp which a manager at head office thought would be a good place to lay a pipeline there is an abandoned monastery on a hill to provide a setting for Egyptian rites in the bayou: yes, a hill in a swamp.  With it so far? Good. Hang on, there’s more.  

When one character escapes no one knows where, but later another casually says he went to the monastery.  Sure.  There are several such continuity gaffs.  

Then there is the incredibly clumsy staging as when the lurching Kharis stands two feet away from a character reaching out his hand, but no one notices, having checked their peripheral vision at the door.  This happens a couple of times.  

While Chaney-Kharis has his bad arm taped to his chest, but when he scoops up the maiden it is suddenly free, only later to be seen strapped up again.  (Sssh. Be quick. Hope no one notices.  [Psst, every noticed.])

The male lead is so far down the list I have forgotten his name as he delivered his lines in a monotone.  But even worse was the evil Gypo priest under the tarboosh who was his assistant, sure, whose eyes flicked to the cue card to get his lines.  But why bother. This evil priest was a Boy Scout. Where is real villainy when it was needed?  Where was George Zucco?  Or John Carradine?  These guys could do menace.  And they could remember their lines! Whereas this priest looks like he is dressing up to earn Eagle Scout points. 

Martin Kosleck as the evil priest’s apprentice is far superior and should have had the major role.  At least Virginia Christine can bug her eyes on demand.  Addison Richards, Holmes Herbert, and William Farnum are reliable character actors in support and far more engaging, entertaining, and credible than the cardboard leads.  

The pipeline crew.

The shambling advertisement for gauze, Lon Chaney, Jr. returned in this vapid tale for the third and last time.  As always he is completely concealed in the wrap and for all viewers know someone (or, even, something else) else might have been in there.  Indeed, that raises the question of why such a name actor was cast and agreed to a part in which he never appears.  He may have had little choice with his studio contract, but even so why use his talents in this way.  Just to get his name in the advertising is the mundane but likely correct answer.  And speaking of his name, on the opening credits he is ‘Lon Chaney’ and not ‘Lon Chaney, Jr.’  Huh?  He was definitely a junior to his famous father.

This Chaney was born while his theatrical parents were on tour and made his first stage appearance when six months old and never left it thereafter.  But he grew up in the shadow of the ‘Man with a Thousand Faces’ who had sired him. Chaney tried for years to create his own identity by using aliases, but he could never escape paternal legacy and gave up trying.  In Wolf Man (1941) Chaney was gripping as the anguished and confused protagonist who could not believe but could not deny what was happening to him.  It must be something like that when a mortal becomes a dean. But his greatest performance was the simpleton Lennie in the John Steinbeck tragedy Of Mice and Men (1939).  See it.  

This foul turkey was released on 22 December 1944 when the Nazi attack at the Battle of Bulge sent the Allied Armies reeling.  More than 9000 GIs had been captured in short order and some of these POWs were then murdered at Malmedy.  On this very day the soft-spoken, short-statured, and mild-mannered General Anthony McAuliffe entered history with one word reply to a Nazi demand that he surrender the beleaguered 101st Airborne at Bastogne:  ’N U T S.’ This is the same unit — the Bastards of Bastogne — that later President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, sent to Little Rock to enforce compliance with a Republican-dominated Supreme Court ruling to integrate schools.  

A Face in the Fog (1936)

A Face in the Fog (1936)  

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute of Dali time, rated 4.5 by 131 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery

Verdict:  Pea souper.

It opens with Major Student Talent sitting in an upstairs apartment while Quasimodo climbs into a window of another room. When she realises this ogre is about, MST runs to get a coat, a matching handbag, the iPhone, a magazine, Opal card, puts on lipstick, and barely escapes from Quasi.  She nips out the front door past the doorman and hails a cab driver smoking nearby.  He obliges but as he opens the door for her, he falls down dead.  As scriptwriting would have it, just then a sedan appears with two dauntless journalists aboard who stop for her, and the MST is saved!  Whew!  What a start to the treacle. 

That’s quick!  Everything slows down from there.

Were they journalists or coppers, I was never sure.  Maybe they weren’t either.  

It seems the ogre Fiend, Quasi to his buddies, is murdering theatrical people.  Some critic!  He knows who he doesn’t like!  

Turns out MST is a journalist who alleged in print that she knew the identity of Quasi, though in fact she didn’t.  Her aim was to draw Quasi out, which she did, but she had no plan when he came out.  She is a journalism graduate for sure.  Blunder ahead. Blame others. Repeat.   

While the several (I lost count) victims are d-e-a-d there are no marks on them.  Huh?  The coroner decides to go back to Med School.  There he finds the victims have been instantaneously poisoned.  But ‘How?’ everyone asks.  ‘Who cares,’ replied the fraternity brothers. 

Here is the one idea in this celluloid:  Quasi has a cap-gun that shoots frozen bullets containing condensed Tweets that poison instantly and seal up the entry wound with chewing gum.  Get this, and get it straight, he carried these bullets around in a cigarette case in the breast pocket of the suit he wore under the cape.  By the miracle of stupidity the frozen bullets do not thaw, but remain frozen. One cold-hearted dude is he.   

By some strange coincidence all the victims come from one Broadway production.  Plod did not fathom this.  A rival producer/writer appears to offer solace and assistance and hangs around.  Get it?  Get it!

There is some incomprehensible dialogue about another hunchback who is too shy to appear.  The comic irritation stumbles around amusing the likes of the President in Thief.  

There is never any explanation of why the villain affected the hunchback, except to invoke German expressionist films.  For that it works.  

Geez, who’d thunk it, but the other producer/writer is mowing down the cast of his rivals to bankrupt them as revenge for not paying overdue fines at the library, or something.  He has custom-made hunchback cape in the latest Paris fashion.  

The soundtrack is terrible, attuned to a silent movie schlock film. Well, this is schlock but not silent.   

The end.  Very welcome words they were, too. 

Murder at Midnight (1931)

Murder at Midnight (1931)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 9 minutes of runtime which is rated 5.4 by 310 cinematizens.

Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Oh hum.

During the Great Depression audiences found the filthy rich playing games.  Upstairs there were card games, and downstairs a playlet was enacted.  In the play a husband finds his wife in the arms of another man as the hall clock strikes midnight, and hubby pulls from his pyjama pocket the gun he always has with him in bed, and shoots paramour. (Cue NRA applause.)  It is all very stagey with the players just barely remembering their lines until…. Bang!  That was a nice touch.  Then the lights come up and we see the audience sitting around the vast parlour in easy chairs who applaud, with snide asides about the truth in play.  

Somehow the playlet is also a word game, and along with everyone else, I didn’t get it.  That may be why  the playlet is referred to as charades in the IMDb summary and all those that cut-and-paste from it by way of review.  But surely no game of charades has dialogue and props that go bang.  

The players take a bow, and drinks are served.  No one, but argus-eyed viewers like this modest scribe, seems to notice that the ostensible paramour is still lying on the floor for the longest time.  In the rush to booze at least one extra stepped over him.  The fraternity brothers admired that commitment to Lord Alcohol.  

But, yes, Jim, he is dead.  Lawyer Monty is present and calls Plod who orders people around, much to the indignation of the filthy rich who cannot see why a murder should interrupt their drinking.  More applause from the fraternity brothers at this point.

So far, so bland. 

But there are twists for it turns out that the homicide Plod was called before — repeat, before — the playlet was staged and that early phone call said there were two murders, not one. Egads!  (This is all confused because the clock was set to midnight to suit the playlet and in the confusion afterward not re-set, until Plod started plodding.)  

At that revelation much confusion consumes screen time until another shot is heard.  Gadzooks! Plod declares with satisfaction, ‘That’ll be the second body.’  (Nifty.) The plot thickens when a will goes missing.  Much lugubrious talking follows. The fraternity brothers snoozed on.  

When a supporting player finds a clue and says so, clonk follows as the body count increases.  Plod assigns a fraternity brother as a guard and he throws peanut shells on the floor.  The butler vacuums up the shells and in so doing finds and hides the will. See if you can guess where.  Brandon Hurst plays the butler to a T, as he often did.  Later the peanut eating is used to loosen the tongue of a reluctant witness who is a neatnik, and he tells all rather than endure the sight of a fraternity brother throwing peanut shells around. These are a couple of amusing wrinkles.  

 It’s an early talkie and it shows.  It is slow and much the dialogue is delivered to the microphone more than addressing any of the characters.  

We never do find out why the neatnik son was so mopey with his millions.  ‘Maybe his underwear were too tight,’ ventured the fraternity bothers, voicing one of their recurrent problems.  

Ever since the murder of Roger Ackroyd it is always the least suspicious character who is the villain and that applies here. (Though I know of at least one film version of Roger Ackroyd that changed that convention. Alas, nothing is scared.) The means of murdering the last couple of stiffs is ingenious and might have an application for the iPhone.  No spoiler on that.  It would take too long to explain to the technologically deprived. 

Aileen Pringle is top billed in this poverty row production. It was unusual at the time for a woman to be at the top of the bill, but then this is an undistinguished lot, most of whom are best known for this unknown film.  Don’t let it go to your head, Aileen.  

The Aztec Monster against the Humanoid Robot (1958).

The Aztec Monster against the Humanoid Robot (1958).

(La momia azteca contra el robot humano)

IMDb meta-data is runtime treacle of 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 2.5 by 2310 cinematizens.

Genre: Mexican.

Verdict: Seeing is not believing.  

The bug-eyed mad German scientist Professor Thermomix whips up a half-man, half-machine robot that looked strangely like Chani, including the arthritic walk, from The Devil Girl from Mars (1954), discussed elsewhere on this blog. No Asimov Laws will limit this concoction, that is for sure.  Why go to all that trouble?  Because Thermomix programs this Chani-Clone to enter a cursed Aztec Tomb and steal the Jade Taco. 

The undead Aztec mummy and Chani exchange fist bumps before grappling (with the script).

Not only is the tomb cursed but also it is guarded by a Lucha Libre champion dead-but-living Mummy.*  Got it so far? 

Turns out that Female Lead is the reincarnation of the undead but unalive Lucha Libre wrestler’s squeeze from a millennia ago, and she and Suave, her paramour, get mixed up in the doings.  I know I was mixed up by the doings.  

It just shows to go that Z-movies can be made everywhere and not just in Dallas.  Move over Larry Buchanan. This exercise had spawn south of the Rio Grande in The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (1959), Wrestling Women vs the Aztec Mummy (1964), Wrestling Women vs. the Murderous Robot (1969), and Mil Mascara vs the Aztec Mummy (2007).  These titles are hard to find, but be assured that I am looking far and wide.

A good Mummy franchise will never die.  But again the fraternity brothers ask, ‘Where are the Daddys?’

*Have you ever wondered where Lucha Libre champions do in retirement?  No, me neither, though I have suspicions of the physiotherapist who works me over.